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Rolling Stones “Exile On Main Street” (1972)
Rocks Off/Rip This Joint/Shake Your Hips/Casino Boogie/Tumbling Dice/Sweet Virginia/Torn And Frayed/Sweet Black Angel/Loving Cup/Happy/Turd On The Run/Ventilator Blues/I Just Want To See His Face/Let It Loose/All Down The Line/Stop Breaking Down/Shine A Light/Soul Survivor
You know that feeling you get sometimes leaning out
the window on a moving train/plane/automobile/heck bicycle (if you're a really
fast pedaller) when the world outside suddenly begins taking on a life its own;
a blurred vision where everything blends together in a sea of changing colours,
with all distinct shapes lost? Sometimes the effect is disorientating and all a
bit too much, making you giddy - but at times it makes what would normally seem
a barren landscape into something a little more interesting for a while (the
way that an abstract painting will flash in front of your eyes with bright
colours but actually gives you less to go on intellectually than a painting
done the 'proper' way). 'Exile On Main Street' is the only audio equivalent I
can really think of, an album so blurred it's the musical equivalent of those
old TV series that used to put Vaseline on the cameras to suggest a 'foggy day'
(or an alien planet full of ants if you're a Dr Who fan). The lyrics are hazy
and often fragmentary, with the songs across this album less developed than
usual and the effect is increased by a bleary-eyed Stones playing long into the
night fuelled by a variety of substances, to the point where it sounds like most
of 'Exile' was made in their sleep (it kinda was for Keith, with the Stones
recording in the basement of his rented villa - not that the guitarist ever got
around to much sleeping!) However it's the mix that truly gives 'Exile' it's
blurred feel, made in a hurry when the band suddenly decided on a tour and
needed something to promote and - unsure quite what to include - the band
decided to throw everything into the mix. This blurry feel has created some
very different re-actions from fans down the years, the main debate being is
the Stones' lone blurred abstract painting in a gallery of straight forward mug
shots (they never do use this album style ever again) the best example of the
Stones perfecting their 'art' and taking it to the next level or is it an example
of the band getting lazy and running out of ideas? The truth, as ever, lies
somewhere in between (although 'both' would also be an acceptable answer AAA
students!)
Of all the 500 records we review at Alan's Album
Archives, 'Exile On Main Street' must be unique in how different re-actions
have changed since the album's release. If you’d have stopped the average rock
fan in the street in 1972, told him you’d just gone back in time from 40 years
later and that the world’s media (particularly the BBC) had just gone mad with
a week’s worth of programmes dedicated to the re-issue of an album which had
never been deleted from catalogue, they’d have probably assumed you were
talking about the real hits of that year: Neil Young’s ‘Harvest’, the
posthumous fuss over Lindisfarne’s ‘Fog On The Tyne’ (released in 1971, this
was the best-selling album of 1972 in Britain), the first self-titled Paul
Simon album or perhaps the year’s best-selling non-compilation album T Rex’s
‘Electric Warrior’. Tell them that you’d actually gone back in time to learn
more about what is now seen as the definitive Rolling Stones album and they’d
have most likely scratched their head, asked ‘oh do they have a new one out?’
and wonder out loud why anyone from the future would be so interested in an
album that wasn't a patch on 'Sticky Fingers'. At the time many fans actively
hated 'Exile', a sprawling double record that swapped the compact clarity and
inventive front cover of 'Sticky Fingers' for a muddy confusing set of
impressionistic songs and a cover that seemed to be badly photocopied and
stapled together. Many critics picked up on the 'laissez faire' attitude of the
album and - even though being rude to your fanbase was a major part of what the
Rolling Stones did back then - took umbrage at just how badly put together this
record was. However time has been kind to this record: there's a lot going on
underneath the surface, which is unusual for the Stones, and the fact that we
can now see this album as a one-off experiment outside the usual pattern makes
it more interesting than it seemed at the time when the world wanted the band
to sound the same. Most fans take this as the last great Stones album - we
don't quite agree (that's the under-rated 'Goat's Head Soup', coming up next)
but it is most certainly the last time that the Stones tried to make something
that differed in any significant way from whatever the last album had been.
Exiled and ex-communicated as it is from the band's usual discography, 'Main
Street' is the rebel hero of the band's back catalogue and is inevitably going
to seem more interesting than a copycat album like, say, 'Rolling Stones no 2'.
But that still doesn't answer the question all our reviews try to answer: is it
any good?
‘Exile’ will never be my favourite Stones record, it
doesn't feature any of my all-time top favourite Stones songs and its certainly
not the album of theirs I play the most (regular readers of this site will know
by now how much I keep banging on about the band’s under-rated psychedelic albums
being the best), but at the same time I can see why it has as many adoring
admirers as it does. While other Stones records tend to have two or three great
career enhancing songs and then tend to coast a bit, this one is full of an
awful lot of very good songs, with only 'Sweet Black Angel' truly awful. Perhaps
best of all it's the one album where Mick and Keith are truly equal partners,
both bringing their own unique brand of mischief to each song: there has never been a Stones song more fully
in tune with Keith's philosophy than 'Happy'; equally songs like 'Let It Loose'
and 'Rip This Joint' ably show off both sides of the Jagger swagger - the slow
weepie ands the raucous rocker. Moreover the pair sing together round the same
microphone on a good two-thirds of this record and Mick's macho posing combined
with Keith's falsetto nagging is a particularly delightful combination here:
'Loving Cup' may well be the best sung Stones song by either of them. Of all
the band's records is the one that feels most complete, the album with so much
stuffed on it that all facets of the Stones’ personality are here, the closest
the band ever came to aping The White Album, albeit one mixed with less care
and time (although at 67 minutes it's actually only the equivalent of three
sides' worth of material: why was the generally excellent material left
unreleased from this album and only issued on CD in 2012 left of this record? I
could also have nominated 27 lesser minutes from this album to throw away
easily, in which case this would easily have been the best Stones release of
them all!) The rest of the band, playing all in one room and bouncing off each
other just like the olden days, are also in cracking form: Charlie booms, Mick
Taylor soars and Bill Wyman holds the whole thing together quietly, as ever
(with horn player and 'seventh Stone' - the sixth being Ian Stewart - Bobby
Keyes at his best throughout the album too In other words, it makes perfect
sense that 'Exile' is a fan's favourite: if the band's records came as teabags
this one would be marked 'extra strong'. ). If this is the band in exile then
we should think about kicking them out more often!
Then again, it's hard to see why everybody seems to
have gone mad for this record so suddenly - especially people who don't
actually like the Stones that much. This is a
comparatively shy and quiet Stones album, without the fireworks of other
albums and whose 'major controversy' alarm only goes off thanks to some badly
misguided lyrics and a patois accent on African-American solidarity track
'Sweet Black Angel' and the record's really off-putting packaging which doesn't
so much scream 'a classic' as 'a classic rip-off'! (Collages of some really
scary photographs that have to be seen to be believed, from the demented looking
man with three satsumas in his mouth and the English hunter with a primus stove
to the midget conductor and the half-man half-dog, just four among 30 equally
off-puttingly gruesome and grimy Victoriana postcards of circus freaks that
suit this album's rebellious spirit but not it's blurred pathos or weary
power). 'Exile's closest claim to fame is 'Tumbling Dice', an under-rated
single that didn't sell that well and which many critics and fans profess not
to like (though I've always had a soft spot for it). While this record has many
fine melodies, they're of the sort that only form in your sub-conscious after
several playings: there's nothing instantly hummable here, which is a good 50%
of the reasons why most classic records are as loved as they are. 'Exile'
doesn't even manage the other key reason an album becomes loved: there's
nothing to link this record to 1972, the only politics being the deeply suspect
ones of 'Sweet Black Angel' - everything else here could have been recorded in
any era (which might be why this album wasn't immediately taken by the
generation of 1972 as one of it's own). It’s as if the Stones are intent on
damning everything about the world around them in 1972: the bright world of
colour television is replaced by eye-hurting monochrome; the carefree fun and
bounce of glam rock is given over to serious blues and an emphasis on the
darkness of life and the crystal-clear production values so beloved of all rock
stars in the early 70s has been replaced by a murky muddy sound that makes even
this most eclectic collection of material sound all the same and lyrics that
aren't dark so much as tired and grumpy. ‘Exile’ is the epitome of the Stones
rejecting everything their public have come to expect of them in 1972 – and yet
it’s very defiance and dangerous subject matters are what we most fondly
remember the band for in 2017. Even the band don’t seem to agree about this
album’s merits: whereas Keith quite happily talks about this album being the
pinnacle of the Stones’ career, Mick Jagger all but hates it, continually
scratching his head in interviews over why this album out of the whole Stones
catalogue should be plump for a revival.
This album was famously recorded on the run from the
establishment – or the taxman at least – and was the first of many albums in
the 70s recorded in another country for no other reason than to avoid paying
high amounts of money to the country they’d been happily staying in for most of
the past decade (see the torrid tale of The Beach Boys’ Holland the following year,
if you feel up to it). To be fair to the Stones, out of all the bands on this
list they were probably the ones who got ripped off the most throughout the
60s, due to a combination of their managers Andrew Loog Oldham and Allen Klein
and if Bill Wyman’s detailed autobiography ‘Stone Alone’ is anything to go by
the band had less money in the bank in 1972 than their roadies did. While
'Sticky Fingers' was the real start of the band's escape from Decca,‘Exile’ was
the first record made from scratch after the protracted legal wrangles getting
rid of Klein was over – their ex-manager, appointed by Loog Oldham but not the
band, actually got more money from their music than they did. Income tax was
also at its peak in Britain in 1972 – or at least the peak for all the 1960s
AAA bands: 83 pence in the pound, leaving the band highly in debt to the Inland
Revenue, forcing the band temporarily out of the country as they began to make
'proper' money for the first time. Nobody seems to quite remember why the band
chose France: it may just have been practicalities as the country nearest
Britain, or it might have been Bianca Jagger's cosmopolitan links. Either way
the Stoners became (self-made) exiles for the making of this record and most of
1972, living in various locations dotted around the South Of France (chaotic
last-minute arrangements meant that the band were scattered hundreds of miles
away from each other, with poor Bill and Charlie getting off worst with a very
long commute to work every day). The
band famously recorded most of this album in Keith Richards’ basement at
Nellcote in the searing heat, with an extractor fan (celebrated in 'Ventilator
Blues') had to be turned on whenever the band weren't working and turned back
off again whenever the tapes began to roll. This romantic image of the band all
together in a foreign clime might well have much to do with this album's
renaissance in the 21st century (it makes for a good story), but like all good
stories it's become a bit 'embellished' down the years. Actually a good third
of this record was recorded in London’s Olympic Studios during the sessions for
previous LP ‘Sticky Fingers’ and the band simply did what they've always done
ever since their second album - pick through the discarded bones of their last
project to find inspiration for the next. Whatever the true history, this album
does sound like it was recorded in just one place with the band jamming night
after night – overdubs are kept to a minimum, the band are for the most part in
the same room at the same time and it’s easy to see how many of these songs
were formed after endless jam sessions with Jagger and Richards selecting the
best bits for their new opus.
The circumstances - the financial wrangles across
1971, the long commute, Keith reportedly staying up for four days at a time to
get the work he wanted done while the rest of the band came and went - might
explain why the band sound so tired for so much of the album. The Stones often
had a slightly lethargic swampy sound in this period of 1968-73 (the records
they made with producer Jimmy Miller), a sound quite unlike any other uptempo
rock band of the era (compare this to an adrenalin-filled Who record of the
era, for instance, and the differences are striking), but 'Exile' is where
feeling a bit sleepy is turned into an art form. Nearly every song runs slower
than it reasonably should, Mick slurs practically every lyric to the point
where I still don't have a clue what half of the words on this album actually
are and songs like 'Ventilator Blues' (a stoned stream of consciousness
apparently caused by insomnia) and 'Torn and Frayed' (a peculiar country-rock
ballad about the 'problems' on the narrator's mind) are the band at their
lowest; ready to drop and admitting how they've all 'seen much better days'.
The other half of the coin though is that they can all drop into line 'whenever
the guitars play' - much of this album is about the band venting their
weariness before suddenly finding inspiration again and this conversation lasts
for most of the album, from 'Rocks Off' heading for an overload of ideas to the
'Soul Survivor' who finds himself the last man standing when everyone else has
either Od'd, left the party or gone to bed, complaining 'I'm the sole survivor
- and it's gonna be the death of me!'
However, that makes it sound as if ‘Exile’ is a
cohesive masterpiece, with the same sonic template delivered by a cooking band
in lots of different ways and great as parts of it are 'Exile' most decidedly
doesn't offer any of that nonsense. Thematically, ‘Exile’ is a sprawling mess
more akin to ‘The White Album’ than, say, ‘Quadrophenia’ and heard out of
context these songs could have appeared on any Stones album to date: there
isn't even the half-theme the band use on so many of their other 70s LPs. What
really makes the difference is the band’s performances: Charlie Watts’ drums
cut through the murk like never before (some joker seems to think they’re the
only sound that matters in the 1980s and insists on mixing them right up high –
whereas here they sit on top of the band sound without over-powering it), Bill
Wyman’s always under-rated bass runs reach a consistent high (or at least they
do on the tracks he actually plays – it’s easy to see where Keith’s inferior
playing replaces it on the finished cut) and Brian Jones’ replacement and
Ronnie Wood’s predecessor Mick Taylor provides some of the best guitar work
ever heard on a Stones album. Mick Jagger may well be at his best here too,
barking out the lyrics with a growl that’s deeper and more deadly than on most
other Stones albums and with a commitment that puts paid to the idea that
during the album sessions he was only a causal bystander. This album is arguably Keith Richards’ grand
statement, though, with more guitar than ever before and a full range of
Keith’s styles from Chuck Berry-style basic rock to country pedal steel (this
is the period he was busy befriending ex-Byrd Gram Parsons who may well be on
this album un-credited given that he spent more time in Keith’s villa than
Keith did in 1972) to that sort of bluesy rocky slurry tone unique to the band
in this early 70s period. Keith dominates the writing of this album in a way
never heard before or since – and gets more vocals than usual in this period
too – probably because it was recorded in his house with Keith able to work all
hours on his grand project (alas the cocaine addiction that gave him the energy
to do this will have all but taken him over a couple of albums later). However
Mick had a lot to do with this record too and overall 'Exile' may well be the
last great 'band' album the Stones make until at least 1978, possibly 1989,
with Keith at the peak of his powers before his slow slide into drug-addled nonchalance.
So is ‘Exile On Main Street’ the band’s great
masterpiece? Even putting aside my love of The Stones’ 1966-68 period, you have
to say that ‘Exile’ is far from the Stones’ best. There are some songs that really
don’t work – even given the Stones’ usual penchance for ruining classic albums
with a single hideous song (see Satanic Majesties’ ‘Sing This All Together’,
Beggar’s Banquet’s ‘Dear Doctor’ and Some Girls’ ‘Faraway Eyes’ in particular)
‘Exile’ has a higher quotient than normal of chaff filtered through with the
wheat. 'Sweet Black Angel' has already been given a rough ride on here, but so
it should: seriously a band with that much of a love for and respect for black
American music shouldn't have been doing this sort of thing still in 1962,
never mind 1972. 'Rip This Joint' is a dangerous precedent for all the Stones' records from the 1980s and 1990s that
nearly all try to sound like this unfocused rock nonsense recorded better by a
million better bands down the years. 'Sweet Virginia' is yet another Godawaful
Stones country-rock song, not as bad as 'Dead Flowers' and 'Faraway Eyes' but
still wrong enough to ask you how it got through quality control (Gram Parsons,
country-rock legend, surely laughed the band out the room when he heard the
playback, with only Jagger's drawl anywhere near authentic). Given how lovely
some of the outtakes from this album are you have to ask: why? The Stones were
generally rather good judges of their own material, so why did they pass over
the finished-sounding gorgeous ballad 'Following The River', say, for any one
of these misfires? Even the worth of songs like ‘Casino Boogie’ and ‘All Down
The Line’, promising songs with intriguing lyrics, gets lost somewhere in the
album's offhand performances and overall murk - they should sound bright and
sparky, not blurry and slurry (the band would have been better off remixing
both and arguably a lot more and returning to them for the next record, as was
their usual method of working).
Those are all my reasons for telling you why 'Exile
On Main Street' is not the world's greatest album, never mind the world's
greatest Stones album, despite what so many people have been saying recently.
But there's still plenty about this album to love: the gradual falling-over of
'Rocks Off' (a band that tries so hard to wake itself up from its lethargy that
it collapses into an exhausted reverie by the end), the soft-shoe-shuffle
gambling song 'Tumbling Dice', the delicate 'Torn and Frayed', the sultry
soft-loud duel 'Loving Cup', Keith's bouncy signature tune 'Happy', the
fascinating weary and fed up experiment 'Ventilator Blues', the groovy
voodoo-ish 'I Just Wanna See His Face' and the stream-of-consciousness 'Casino
Boogie'. Eight really strong and very different songs would be more than enough
for most albums and is actually pretty good odds for most AAA albums. However
the album's trouble is that this is an 18 track album, not a 12 track one, with
all that good work getting largely undone by the less interesting songs
surrounding these gems. While less consistent and less memorable than either of
the two albums that sandwich it ('Sticky Fingers' and the under-rated 'Goat's
Head Soup'), 'Exile' has many things going for it compared to these two: the
strong band performances, the unusual blurry texture unique to this album and
some very interesting ideas that prove how much the Stones still had left to
give in the years before they fell into self-parody. There are better albums
around, more deserving of the 'classic albums' tag - but this is a good album
even so, one that delivers up more and more to the listener each time they hear
it and allow themselves to get carried away by Exile's hypnotic grooves.
One final word before we move onto the songs. We
don't often harp on about what format you lot need to listen to these albums.
For a start there aren't many AAA albums I've owned on every one of the main
four formats as of 2014 anyway (vinyl, cassette, CD, MP3), but I also fully
believe that if an album is really good it will work whatever format you own it
on: a tens-of-thousands-of-pounds hi-fi system with your own personal DJ or a
battered worn out vinyl somebody once stood on - if a piece of music 'works' it
will do so oblivious of what circumstances you hear it in (there's a story that
The Beatles used to play every single of theirs using a vinyl acetate on a
beaten up record player in mono to check they would sound 'powerful' enough to
listeners who only had poor equipment or could only pick up distorted
off-station mono radio broadcasts). 'Exile' is one of our rare exceptions.
Generally speaking upgrading vinyl copies to CD is a good idea - they take up
less space and CD either works or it doesn't, while a vinyl record is
effectively in a state of deterioration from the day you buy it unless you take
extra care. We could get into an argument about CD remixes never being an exact
replica and no doubt we will some other time soon (it's the equivalent of
having identical twins - while casual people might not see any difference at
all the better you know someone the more differences between them you can
tell), but by and large CD mixes tend to improve sound: they take away the tape
hiss from the original recordings, give the songs a spit and polish and offer a
useful chance to correct any mistakes in the original mix ( engineers are only
human, though their final decisions effectively mean playing God with music and
setting recordings into stone). All worthy ideals that work for 99.9% of all
the records you will ever want to own - but hopelessly wrong in the case of
'Exile', a record that demands to be heard on a beaten up piece of crackly
vinyl. Every time the band remix it and re-issue it on CD it seems to lose a
bit more of its lustre, to the point where in about 50 years' time 'Exile' is
in danger of sounding like every other Stones album out there. Please for
goodness sake stop giving this brilliantly dirty scruffy album an aural bath -
there are already plenty of Stones
records out there that sound too clean for their own good; a bit of grit and
dirt never hurt anyone (this is, after all, a band named after a song by 'Muddy
Waters'!) Rant over it's on to...
The
Songs:
[153] ‘Rocks Off’ is the album’s opening track and already the band
are playing with our heads. Like most of ‘Between The Buttons’ this track is a
sheep in wolf’s clothing, but unlike that 1967 album’s ballads-posing-as-angry-rockers,
nasty-rockers-posing-as-sweet-ballads ‘Rocks Off’ is an energetic, all singing
all dancing song about how low on energy the narrator is. In fact ‘Rocks Off’
is a classic fed-up blurred rocker in the ‘Satisfaction’ mode, with the narrator
fed up and grumpy rather than angry. ‘Rocks Off’s classic line is ‘I want to
shout, but I can barely speak’ and that sums up this song’s slow-footed
adrenalin rush perfectly: the swampy mix and slow tempo belies the energy that
Jagger in particular pours into this song, complaining of overload and going
numb to a tune that is played with more energy than any Stones song in years.
Jagger’s vocal is one of his very best and must surely have hurt his throat
badly with the sudden switches between slurred tiredness on the verses and
outright screaming on the choruses. The melody line, which starts low and then
builds up in pitch almost line by line as the song gets goings is excellent,
ratcheting the tension up until the narrator is forced to scream at the top of
his lungs how he can ‘only get my rocks off when I’m dreaming’. The song
perfectly encapsulates the rush and mania of the Stones in the late 60s/early
70s with tour after album after tour and how badly the band need a rest. Of
course, this being the Stones, there’s plenty of sexual tension in the lyrics
too, with the chorus doubling as a pained paean to the narrator’s love life and
how he can only find satisfaction during his dreams. One of the very best songs
on this album, ‘Rocks Off’ is an under-rated and actually quite complex song
that also makes a fine theme song for chronic fatigue syndrome!
[154] ‘Rip This Joint’ is another high energy song, but given such a
murky and impenetrable mix that it sounds equally blurry and tired at times.
It’s easy to imagine the Stones grouped together in Keith’s basement taking
several runs at this song and revisiting their early days as a basic rock band
– except, of course, unlike most bands on this list, the Stones started their
career with blues cover not rock and rollers and only started getting into
copying Chuck Berry once they won their record contract with Decca. There’s
nothing that special or particular inventive about ‘Rip This Joint’, it’s just
a two minute burst of rock and roll from a band getting back to their roots
that is badly served by the production mess: this is the one song on this album
above the others that needs to be crystal clear and powerful. As it is, it
sounds a bit of a mess and trying to hear what Jagger’s singing becomes irritating
rather than fascinating, even if its fun to hear the Stones singing an original
that sounds like a 1950s rock and roll standard.
[155] ‘Shake Your Hips’ is, ironically, an old cover updated to sound
contemporary. This Slim Harpo blues cover is highly suited to the Stones’
hypnotic trance-like productions in this period, repeating the same plucked-out
simple riff and tap-tap drum pattern over and over while a particularly
murky-sounding Jagger tells us how to dance. If you’re not a fan of the Stones
you’ll positively hate this song where the whole point is the repetition and
the slow succumbing of the listener to the groove, but if you’re a fan this is
the sort of thing you’ll have always wanted to hear: Jagger at his most
seductive, Keith at his most bald and Mick Taylor really given space to fly
with the lyrical guitar solo. For once this album’s sparse production makes
this song sound better than it actually is, with the feeling that the band
really are in your living room and bouncing off the walls, warts and all,
although alas this not-quite three minute song ends just at the point when it’s
becoming really interesting (did one of the band make a mistake? Surely there’s
no other reason for building up to such a crescendo and then not giving us the
pay off!) I’m surprised this song didn’t stay longer in the Stones’ live
catalogue too as it sounds tailor made to audience seduction, with enough room
for Keith to show off his guitar chops and enough space for Mick to show off
than he can actually still move his hips.
[156] ‘Casino Boogie’, however, positively drowns under the weight of
the production values. This is a lyrical, Dylan-ish song that sounds more like
a Brian Jones-era piece than a 70-s one, married to a basic good time groove
the Stones made their own back when. However, the song is clearly born out of
Keith’s problems in 1972 with drugs, tax problems (‘a million dollars sad’),
work (‘fame is getting me twitchy – got no time on my hands’) and maybe even guilt at Brian Jones’ death
and the ever popular Stones past-time of swapping girlfriends. Just take a look
at the opening line: ‘no good, can’t speak, wound up, can’t sleep’; this isn’t
a rock God talking to us here but a very fragile human being pouring their
heart out into a song. On face value this song is the usual Stones swagger, but
the more you get to know this album the more it sounds like the dropping of the
charade, with Jagger and Richards’ vocals all but left bare for the first part
of the song and sounding very isolated, before the band kick in and Keith gets
to channel his frustration in the epitome of all fed-up guitar solos, lurching
from one idea to the other just like the brain the narrator can’t keep still.
It’s most certainly not a ‘boogie’ as the sarcastic title tells us – it sounds
like the people bankrupted at the casino having a consolation party afterwards
rather than any real celebration. A special mention for the saxophone passage
by Bobby Keys, overdubbed in a studio in Britain at a later date. Now I’m not
usually a big fan of saxophones in rock music – if you’re not 100% committed a
saxophone solo in the middle of a song inevitably makes it sound like MOR and
if you are out on the edge then the last thing you want to hear is an
instrument categorised with cocktails and lounging. But for some reason this
passage really works in this song, emphasising the fed-up qualities in a song
which in other people’s hands would come out sounding like a slow ballad but
here sounds like a mournful goodbye
performed by a band doing everything in their power to overturn the
decision.
[157a] ‘Tumbling Dice’ is the album’s best known track – indeed,
considering this album’s status as a classic album its strange to admit it’s
probably the only track that people who don’t own this album might know. Like
the album, this single brought a very mixed response when it came out as its
hardly the most immediate song the band ever put out – but if you give way to
its innocuous groove and accept that you can’t always hear the lyrics this is a
very lovely song indeed. Like many a song on this album it’s loosely related to
money and gambling, but this time its about the randomness that life throws up
every time you take a step forwards and have to wait for fate to throw the dice
to decide how well your latest romance/job/life change will work. Like the last
track, this is a song born out of frustration – unusual for the Stones but
obviously rooted in all the tax and managerial problems they had in this period
and were out of their hands. Again the track tries to fool us with its gentle
and very Stonesy riff and its lyrics about ‘I don’t worry’, but don’t believe a
word of it: the slow tempo and the hidden messages in the words makes it clear
that this is a very downbeat song indeed. Mick Jagger turns in another sterling
vocal, barking his head off at the fates for giving him such a low deal without
ever sinking to self-pity or self-caricature as he so often does on the albums
after this, although interestingly given the fragile lyrics most rock critics
agree this song is predominantly Keith’s work. The production murk is toned
down here, perhaps because the band intended this to be the album’s spin-off
single from the beginning, but it’s still a little too echoey and confusing for
this song which really needs to hit the narrator (and us) in the stomach. The
use of female backing singers is another questionable choice – this
sorry-for-itself song needs to be isolated and troubled, not dressed up to
sound grand I think. Still, this song is another sterling effort with a really
detailed and moving set of lyrics about troubled circumstances coupled with one
of the band’s better Chuck Berry-like riffs. Most commentators today will tell
you it’s the worst thing on the album but don’t listen – this song’s gentle seduction
is a delight.
[158] ‘Sweet Virginia’, however, is truly horrible. The song that
kicks off side two of the album – which Keith later described as the ‘listen to
late at night side’ – is just too far removed from the typical Stones sound.
It’s the latest in a long line of poor country songs, ones that are scuppered
not by their genre but because the band can’t decide between them whether to
treat the genre as seriously as rock or take the piss out of it. Jagger treats
this song more seriously than most, perhaps because this is one of the few
Stones originals in the country mould rather than covers, but his false
American accent is irritating, particularly given that the swampy mix makes it
even harder to work out what he’s singing. The lyrics have nothing really to
say being yet another song in the where-did-it-go-wrong-and-can-we-start-again
mode: a throwaway line about scraping shit off shoes would have been quite
brave then but sounds silly now and is about the only one most Stones fans can
name. The band also sound drunk on the performance, with even the usually
reliable Charlie Watts sounding less than his reliable self. AAA fans might
wish to note that Small Faces bassist Ronnie Lane made this song a regular in
concerts of the 1970s – a live version can be heard on the compilation ‘How
Come’, although to be honest it’s not any improvement on this sorry original.
[159] ‘Torn and Frayed’ is probably my favourite track on the album,
summing up this album’s strengths (a blurry tightness unique to this album) as
already heard but with none of this album’s weaknesses (it’s slapdashness).
This is another song that’s hard to hear but seems to sum up perfectly the
situation behind this record: comparing the Stones to a coat Jagger’s narrator
tells us how the band’s been around for a few years now but as long as all the
musicians can keep it together they can still move people just like they used
to. And I’m not going to disagree: this spooky song is an arrangement
masterpiece, with both Richards and Taylor trading guitar lines over an organ
riff by Nicky Hopkins keeping the band tied to the mothership. Best of all is
the pedal steel part played by Manassas legend Al Perkins (see review no 50)
which is about the happiest pedal steel part I’ve ever heard. In fact come to
think of it, this song about solidarity in the face of trouble is the happiest
song on the album by some margin, with even a few comedy lines thrown in about
life in Keith’s villa (‘Now, whose going to help in the kitchen?’ sings Jagger
at one point). Even here though there’s quite a few moments of doubt, with the
guitar player ‘getting restless’ (Keith’s drug withdrawals or an early sign of
Mick Taylor leaving the band?) and the long fade-out desperately repeating
‘just as long as the guitar plays’ like a mantra, as if the band are working
really hard at keeping things together.
Most of ‘Exile On Main Street’ is timeless – or at
least it is for a Stones album, most of which are firmly rooted to the decade
of their birth, one of the many reasons why its this album that has trounced
this album in ‘greatest album’ polls over the past two decades. But next track [160]
‘Sweet Black Angel’
really puts quite a few feet wrong: it’s meant to be a song about black radical
Angela Davis who was given a quite ridiculous jail sentence for getting roped
up in the Black Panther power movement. Alas, some of the lyrics of this track
prove that the Stones really didn’t get what they were singing about – even in
jest lines like ’10 little n***ers sitting on the wall’ are missing the point
about Angela and her colleagues’ demands for equality, especially when sung by
Jagger in a bad Jamaican accent. Many Stones songs are tongue-in-cheek but I
honestly don’t think this is one – it’s much maligned chorus lines of ‘she’s a sweet
black angel, not a gun toting teacher, won’t somebody free her?’ sound
perfectly genuine and Keith’s harmony vocal has a definite edge on this track
that Jagger’s doesn’t have. The world
has moved on since 1972, though, and you just couldn’t get away with a
half-hearted message song like this today.
John Lennon too spoke out on her behalf on his ‘Sometime In New York
City’ album of the same year which is just as bad as this track with it’s twee
politics (‘Angela, you’re one of millions of political prisoners in the world’
– well, who’d’ve’ thought it?!) A truly unique song in the Stones’ canon – the
only political song about an individual that isn’t one of the band, this song’s
only vague cousin is 1984’s ‘Undercover Of The Night’ – and that song’s more
about people making noise and not doing anything; this is crying out about somebody doing something and
getting in trouble for it, something the Stones knew all about after their
various drugs convictions in the 70s.
Luckily [161a] ‘Loving Cup’ is much better, another of the
album’s highlights and another in the Stones’ canon that is one song
masquerading as something else. The song starts with a delightful flowery
passage from band aide Nicky Hopkins whose work on throughout this album is as
excellent as ever, the perfect foil to the Stones’ nasty side. Most of this
song becomes a sweet ballad, albeit one played with Charlie Watts’ drums mixed
up loud, and it appears at first that the narrator is keeping to his promises
of being a gentlemen and letting a relationship flow to its own slow natural
path. However, the chorus line seems to cut in from nowhere as the narrator
cries lustily ‘gimme a little drink from your loving cup!’ This exciting little
chorus then gets even more inventive when after slowing down into a full stop
and going back to the melody of the verse it suddenly kicks in again: ‘just one
drink from your loving cup!’ This is, you see, a song about addiction no matter
how well the narrator tries to hide his true feelings, although like many a
song on ‘Exile’ it’s probably more about relationships in the band than a
loving one: ‘I’m stumbling, but I don’t play bad guitar’ sounds like another of
Keith’s diary entries from this period, warning the band how much the drugs
have taken hold. The ‘loving cup’ in this interpretation is the music itself:
goodness knows the band must have tempted to knock the Stones on the head,
especially after the fall of The Beatles and their own problems throughout the
late 60s, but this song and several others on this album sound like the band
re-discovering their drive and hunger and perhaps each other: the line ‘I’d
love to spill the beans with you till dawn’ is one of the kindest things Mick
or Keith ever wrote, even if this jagged cry from the heart is hardly a love
song in the classic sense.
[162] ‘Happy’ is Keith’s only lead vocal on the album suggesting he
must have been close to it (there is a version on bootleg of Mick singing lead
– which doesn’t appear to be on the CD re-issue sadly – which sounds far more
polished and finished than this take and indeed you can hear an extract from it
at the fadeout of this take). ‘Happy’ does appear to be Keith’s philosophy on
life: compared to Mick Keith is naturally seen as a downbeat, loner figure by
The Stones but if something good is happening in his life, be it the band or
his latest romance, then he can’t wait to get out of bed an celebrate it.
However, even this seemingly upbeat song comes at a price: the chorus could run
‘I need a love to be happy’ but here its ‘I need a love to keep me happy’ –
Keith’s only too aware of how fleeting happiness can be and this song is
continually switching between happy major and sad minor keys, as if the
narrator is glancing over his shoulder to make sure sadness isn’t following him
close by. There are lots of other ambiguous lines here too: the allure of the
Stones and their lifestyle, as heard in the last track, has now become a nasty
self-centred philosophy (‘always took candy from strangers, never wanted to get
me no trade’). Hearing the band fade out on the line ‘happy’, repeated over and
over on a minor chord that won’t resolve itself, is one of the most unsettling passages on any Stones
record. As a result, ‘Happy’ is a troubling song, telling us something while
hiding the truth and unlike the other Stones songs that pull the same trick it
doesn’t so much make you go ‘that’s clever’ as ‘that’s creepy’. AAA favourite
and Stones fan Nils Lofgren, who came close to joining the band instead of
Ronnie Wood in 1976, covered this song on his album of that year ‘Night Fades
Away’, as if to prove how good he could have sounded in the band, but sadly
takes the song at face value, slowing the tempo down but making it sound far
more upbeat.
[163] ‘Turd On The Run’ is, despite its unfortunate name, one of the
very best songs on the album yet one that almost every other commentator on
this album misses out. ‘Run’ is a fast-paced yet sinister rocker that really
does sound like the band trapped in the studio and laying down a groove before
they can go home. The song barely moves off the one chord (and it sounds like
one of the most overpowering parts of the album when they finally do 90 seconds
in) but is still one of the most exciting songs the Stones ever did. The
guitars are meshing together nicely, Jagger gets out his old harmonica with one
of the best solos he ever played even counting his 60s triumphs and Wyman and
Watts are driving the song forward at full propulsion. You still can’t hear the
lyrics that well but when you decipher them they become a sweet little retro
triumph about a loser putting all his energies into one relationship that takes
his life over and is everything he dreamed about but falls apart really quickly
(and, depending how you read the lyrics, ends up giving him a sexually
transmitted disease so he can’t enjoy the next lover on his list either).
Coming after no less than seven ambiguous and – for The Stones – slow songs on
the trot this song is perfect at upping the energy levels and is a testament to
whoever planned the running order for the album. Jagger clearly has fun
re-creating his 1960s persona too, with lots of shouts and screams not heard
for a long time on a Stones longplayer, although its Mick Taylor’s entrance
halfway through the song, mimicking Keith’s Chuck Berry-ish riff but with a
more fluid style, that makes the song. A definite success which has been
overlooked for far too long.
[164] ‘Ventilator Blues’ sounds like an even heavier version of
‘Casino Boogie’, if that’s possible. This is another of Keith’s
everything’s-going-wrong-songs of the period but things sound even scarier and
more futile than before. The list of grievances in the first verse of what his
body is going through – presumably from heavy drugs – is truly scary, while the
line about committing ‘first degree murder’ because his woman doesn’t stop
being nasty to him sounds real, rather than tongue-in-cheek like many of The
Stones’ blues rip-offs. What’s perhaps most scary is the ungrammatical way the
lyrics go, as if the narrator can’t think straight any more and, together with
Charlie Watts’ head-crashing cymbals when we’re least expecting it, sounds like
the migraine/hangoverfrom hell. Mick excels at the depth of the song he’s been
given to sing, growling at the very bottom of his register, while the band find
the slow pace of the song really suits the pace of the song. However, the band
run out of steam early on, merely repeating the verse-chorus-verse-chorus
structure without giving us any surprises, although the monotony of the song
does have a certain appeal too. Certainly the ending, with Mick’s mournful and
defeatist ‘can’t find it, can’t fight it’, sticks in the throat. The title and
throwaway lyrics in the last verse refer to the ventilator in Keith’s basement
which on some recordings is meant to have drowned out the musicians struggling
to play and some sharp-eared listeners have picked up on this final take,
although I can’t say I’ve ever heard it myself.
The song then blends into the third strong song on
the trot with the often overlooked [165] ‘I Just Want To See His Face’. Another song that’s
truly unique in the Stones canon, this stream of consciousness song merges
gospel with voodoo, with a scary and hypnotic bass/keyboard riff overdubbed
with Mick Jagger sounding like he’s singing down a tunnel and a choir of
crystal clear female voices joining in with him. One of the better songs about
religion in the AAA archives, this song rattles on for a good minute before
Mick finally stops scat singing and tells us straight: with so much wrong in
his life it would give him strength to know that there’s a grand design for his
life and that its not in vain. Unwilling to hear what the religious leaders
have to say or debate the finer points of Christianity, the narrator tells us
how he ‘just wants to see his face’ and know that something is out there. Mick
even borrows from the earlier Stones hit ‘Everybody Needs Somebody To Love’,
turning the track into a kind of anti-gospel, with the heavenly-sounding
singers joining in about how much stronger their faith could be if they could
just see Jesus’ faith and didn’t have to rely on his word. A truly spooky song,
with Charlie Watts working overtime on all the percussion overdubs, this is a
milestone of a track, the inventive likes of which won’t be seen again on a
Stones album until 1981’s gorgeous and equally fragmented ‘Heaven’.
[166] ‘Let It Loose’ is most critic’s favourite song on ‘Exile’ but I
can’t say it does a lot for me: the tune meanders like many on this album, but
sounds mighty close to something familiar instead of being unique to the Stones
and the lyrics are nothing special. The only truly inventive part of this song
is the horn part, which is indeed beautiful and completely out of left-field
for the band, but that’s small pickings for a song that obviously tries hard to
be the epic on the album. For the most part this song is a ‘Let It Be’ retread,
with a walking pace ballad filled with gospel images and another gospel choir
all tied together by Nicky Hopkins on the organ. The lyrics are generally
agreed to be Mick having second thoughts about his society wedding to model
Bianca, now that so many of his close friends have come to him to warn him
about her, but that could just be the usual writer’s prop and not based on
truth as such. Say what you will about this album but once you get beyond the
murky production values its never boring – except for this unwelcome track.
[167] ‘All Down The Line’ is no classic either, despite re-instating
Charlie Watts to the forefront of the band’s sound and trying once again to
sound like an early 60s outtake. There’s nothing bad about this track by any
means, its just that it has nothing new to say: you know exactly when the track
is going to change key, when the guitar solo is going to kick in and to the
milli-second how long the interminable chorus is going to last. Amazingly this
pretty but rather nothing track was considered to be the band’s first single on
their own record label instead of the (admittedly equally awful and tasteless
but much more commercial) resulting single ‘Brown Sugar’. It also predates the
album sessions by some 18 months, having been wisely passed over for inclusion
on the ‘Sticky Fingers’ record.
You may have noticed a definite running out of steam
during the latter stages of this album. Certainly, if I had my way, I’d know
what songs to trim to cut this album down to a single one – and one of the
first to go would be the weak Robert Johnson cover [168] ‘Stop Breaking Down’.
While Robert Johnson’s bluesy original is seductive, pleading and ear-catching
(and the Stones’ own re-write ‘Break It Down’ on 1989’s Steel Wheels isn’t far
behind), the Stones’ version just passes you by in a swirl of out of tune
harmonica, grungy guitar and Mick Jagger singing by numbers. This is another
song dating from 1970 and apparently added to the album in order to fill up
enough room to make it a double (but as it is at 68 minutes ‘Exile On Main
Street’ must be one of the shortest double album ever released). The band cook
up a storm in the second half of the song, mainly courtesy of Mick Taylor’s
George Harrison-esque steel guitar solo, but never really takes off.
[169] ‘Shine A Light’ is more gospel from The Stones, this time sung
straight and so strange is the change in direction that it rather takes you by
surprise – never before did we expect to hear a Stone sing ‘may the good Lord
shine a light on you’. Mick is obviously genuinely moved, though, writing one
of his best love songs which is all the better for the sense of wonder and awe
he induces in the listener while gazing at his beloved and wondering how she
came to choose him. Mick’s opening line, about staggering from a busy day to
find the person of his dreams quietly waiting for him in ‘hotel room 1009’ is
perfectly cast, although his vocal gets rather swamped by the band and the
backing singers later in the song. His advice to her – and us – to ‘make every
song your favourite tune’ has become something of an anthem for Stones fans too
and is a rare instance of an upbeat, positive tune on this troubled double.
Most fans adore this song and it was even added to the band’s set lists during
the last ‘Bigger Bang’ tour, but while the lyrics are indeed pretty special the
tune can’t match them and its hard to work out where the song is going. The
murky production doesn’t help either, although strangely the girl choir sound
perfectly clear, just to rub in how backward recording techniques were at
Keith’s basement. Unusually, this is one song the band play better in the 21st
century than they did at the time – or is it just the production getting in the
way of this album again?
The album ends on a positive at long last with the
troubled [170] ‘Soul
Survivor’ which follows the album trick of couching its real meanings in
sound. This song speaks about survival for the most part, of overcoming
obstacles and getting away with it, but suddenly in comes that troubled chorus
line ‘its gonna be the death of me!’ So what we have here is a song from a
guitarist who knows he’s gotten away with skirting with death a few too many
times and isn’t prepared to go down quietly – but all the hoohah the lifestyle
causes is slowing him down and wearing him out. If we take this song as
autobiographical – and it might not be - Keith is apparently afraid of going
out with a whimper rather than bang as he wants – and as his friend/rival Brian
Jones did in 1969 despite appearances to the contrary of him slowly fading away
over time. Cue one of the album’s more angst ridden tracks, with a backwards
version of the familiar Stones Satisfaction/Start Me Up et al riff, with enough
unexpected surprises and trapdoors to keep us guessing about the song to the
end.
So, soggy mess or aural masterpiece? Well, as ever,
‘Exile On Main Street’ is a bit of both. What’s surprised me most about this
album’s revival in the past two decades is how un-Stones parts of it is, with
the album largely unique to the Stones canon (although 1967’s ‘Between The
Buttons’ can be seen as an early try at giving us a kind of inverted Stones
album, one that sounds familiar on first listen but reveals all sorts of
shifting feelings on further hearings). Having written this site for a while
its probably fair to say that there is some sort of a pattern emerging: most
classic albums as loved worldwide tend to be unified, however disparate their
parts may be (‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ is the obvious choice), have very little
filler (‘Revolver’ or ‘Smile’ are about the closest we get to date), fit the
time and surroundings of their release perfectly (‘Sgt Peppers’) and sound like
the band’s usual formula times 1000, whether by production, accident or design
(‘Who’s Next). ‘Exile On Main Street manages to be a ‘classic album’ without
ever really embracing any of these ideas – it’s not that unified (although
parts of it do link together – namely Keith’s ‘worried’ songs), it’s not that
consistent (any album with ‘Sweet Virginia’ and ‘Sweet Black Angel’
automatically lose a great number of marks in my book), it sounds like no other
album made in the whole of the 70s never mind being specific to 1972 (hence the
fact that it wasn’t that well regarded at the time) and tries it’s best to
extend the band’s usual formula, not magnify it.
‘Exile’ exists pretty much on its own in the racks
of classic albums, except perhaps for The Beatles White Album, for defining a
band by their very sprawling, disassociated manner. As I said before, it will
never be my favourite Stones LP, but I can see sparks of greatness sprinkled
throughout the set and it does after all feature one of the world’s best ever
bands at more or less the peak of the powers. So although the amount of hoo-hah
over this latest re-issue seems overdone to say the least, at the same time
it’s pleasing that an album so under-rated at the time is no longer an exile in
the hearts of collectors all over the world.
A Now Complete List Of Rolling Stones
and Related Articles To Read At Alan’s Album Archives:
'No 2' (1965) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/the-rolling-stones-no-2-1965.html
'It's Only Rock 'n' Roll' (1974)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-rolling-stones-its-only-rock-and.html
'Emotional Rescue' (1980) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/the-rolling-stones-emotional-rescue-1980.html
'Undercover'
(1983)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/rolling-stones-undercover-1983-album.html
‘Voodoo
Lounge’ (1994) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/rolling-stones-voodoo-lounge-1994.html
'Bridges
To Babylon' (1998) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/the-rolling-stones-bridges-to-babylon.html
'A
Bigger Bang' (2005) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/the-rolling-stones-bigger-bang-2005.html
Ronnie
Wood and Bill Wyman's Rhythm Kings Solo http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/a-short-aaa-guide-to-ronnie-wood-and.html
Rolling Stones: Unreleased Recordings http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/another-journey-through-past-darkly.html
Surviving TV Clips and Music Videos
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-rolling-stones-surviving-tv-clips.html
Non-Album Recordings Part One 1962-1969
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2017/01/rolling-stones-non-album-songs-part-one.html
Non-Album Recordings Part Two 1970-2014
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-rolling-stones-non-album-songs-part.html
Live/Solo/Compilations Part One 1963-1974
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-rolling-stones-livesolocompilationa.html
Live/Solo/Compilations Part Two 1975-1988
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-rolling-stones-livesolocompilation.html
